New chapter | Giant Voltaire jack-up heads for North Sea to build world's biggest wind plant
Record-setting Jan De Nul installation vessel's first assignment will be erecting some 300 GE Haliade-X turbines at 3.6GW Dogger Bank mega-project being developed off UK by Equinor and SSE
Belgian contractor Jan De Nul’s giant Voltaire wind turbine installation vessel (WTIV) has sailed out from the Cosco shipyard in Nantong, China en route to its maiden assignment helping build the world’s biggest wind farm, the 3.6GW Dogger Bank in the UK North Sea.
The jack-up, which has 130-metre-long legs, 3,000-tonne crane, and 16,000-tonne deck capacity, making it one of the mightiest WTIVs yet devised by the industry, will install as many as 300 of GE’s 13MW Haliade-X turbines at the Equinor-SSE project off southern England.
“The Voltaire is the world’s tallest jack-up installation vessel. [Its] innovative design makes the vessel highly suitable for the installation of next-generation wind farms,” said Jan De Nul. “Voltaire will be showing her best for the first time in the Dogger Bank project.”
The Voltaire is among a fleet of gargantuan WTIVs heading for the water in the coming years as the global wind industry ramps up plans to build hundreds of gigawatts of offshore plant using turbines with nameplates 15MW and larger.
Jan De Nul is also building its innovative Les Alizés WTIV, which unlike conventional jack-up desigs is a floating unit with no ‘legs’, at CMHI Haimen shipyard in China.
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